When it comes to community platforms, there are numerous to choose from.

Among these, Circle has been making a lot of waves in the industry recently, in spite of being a newcomer in the market.

Here’s a surprise:

It’s backed by founders of Teachable.

But is it really worth the price?

In this blog post, let me review Circle.

What is Circle?

Circle is an all-in-one community platform designed for businesses, startups, community builders, and coaches.

It was launched in 2019 by Sid Yadav, who is Teachable’s first designer, and later backed by Ankur Nagpal (invested 90% of his liquid net-worth), the founder of Teachable.

With their support and track record, Circle quickly gained traction and raised additional funds (valued at $200M)!

👉 I’ve been using Circle from last two years and all I can say is It is a well-thought-out platform built from the ground up by following the roadmap of new age startups like Notion and Slack (first principles thinking).

Let’s get started.

It comes with a lot of comprehensive features for building communities, including some really good features.

Here is a quick breakdown of Circle’s features.

Features	Circle.so
Pricing starts at 💲	$49/mo (without “Courses” feature) – Visit the pricing page
Transaction fees	4% on the lowest plan, 1% fee on the Professional plan, and 0.5% on the Enterprise plan.
Mobile apps 📱	Has both Android and iOS apps
Support a custom domain?	Yes
Does it have a course feature?	Yes (8/10)
Has native live streaming? 📷	Yes
Integrations	Native integrations with 10+ apps. It also has Zapier, Make.com & and Integrately.

Quick decision

What do I like about Circle.so? 👍

• Intuitive UI/UX: Clean, modern interface reminiscent of Slack and Discord. Less cluttered than competitors like Mighty Networks, making navigation seamless.
• Courses: Integrated course hosting alongside community features, ideal for creators who want to offer educational content.
• Moderation tools: Robust spam prevention with keyword blocklists and content flagging. Particularly useful for managing public groups effectively.
• Mobile apps: iOS and Android apps available, enabling users to access communities, courses, and memberships on mobile devices.
• Live-streaming: Built-in feature for real-time community engagement. Recently added live spaces for group-specific broadcasts.
• Automation workflows: Streamline community management through task automation and bulk actions. Available on Business plan and above, comparable to having Zapier for community management.
• Rapid innovation: Frequent updates and new features, as they are leveraging Teachable experience.

What I don’t like about Circle.so? 👎

• Not an all-in-one platform: By being a community-centric platform, it doesn’t come with the ability to create your own website, email marketing, and also strong marketing features.
• Not affordable: At even $49 per month, Circle’s Basic plan only supports up to 100 community members. So, most users opt for the Professional plan, which costs $99 per month.
• Basic course component: Circle’s course component lacks advanced features like course certificates, course compliance features, graded quizzes & assessments, video analytics, heatmaps, etc. However they’re in their roadmap.
• Limited marketing features: Unfortunately, Circle doesn’t offer marketing features like email marketing and sales funnels.

Upfront bottom line

As a user, I find Circle a joy to use due to its excellent UI and UX.

It has impressive automation engine and integrations with various apps. Also, the app has really good funding (as explained above) and the pace at which they are shipping new is encouraging.

While it lacks some advanced course creation features and built-in email marketing, these can be managed through integrations.

Overall, based on my review, Circle is a solid choice for those looking to start a community and offer courses, with room for more improvements in marketing capabilities.

Explore Circle

Community

Interface and ease of use

You can think of Circle as a hybrid between Slack and online forums.

It has a sidebar-centric navigation similar to Slack. As an avid user of Notion, Slack, and even Arc Browser, this is really intuitive for me.

They also have a community switcher tool similar to new-age chat platforms like Discord. With just a single click, community members can quickly switch between multiple spaces.

So yeah, it’s be a really good feature for them to have for growth.

Organization

You can build communities that have:

1. Groups: Collection of spaces, similar to a category or a folder.
2. Spaces: It’s a feature like Slack channels or WhatsApp groups, serving as the platform for specific discussions or content.

You can create either public or private spaces.

When you create a space, it asks you to select the type of the Space.

As of now, there are 4 different types of spaces you can create like:

1. Posts: Create and share content with your community (think of a forum).
2. Events: Organize and manage live events for your members.
3. Chat: Engage in real-time conversations with your community members.
4. Course: Educate your audience.

You can’t have multiple different content types inside a particular space

This leads to a lot of clutter in the sidebar.

You can enable the space content to be displayed in different layouts like:

• Post (suitable most of the times): Displays posts’ content in a scrollable feed
• List: Collapses posts to show only the title, the last post date, and like/comment counts
• Card: Posts are displayed in a grid showing the cover image

Posting content

In every space you create in Circle, you can create content.

The content that you create in each of the spaces can be further organized in folders to help you keep the content organized.

Now, when it comes to creating actual content, Circle features a fully featured editor that supports “/” commands.

Similar to Notion app, you can use any of these building blocks for creating content.

🤖 Also, they have AI co-pilot functionality that allows you to access ChatGPT like AI assistant right inside the post editor to speed up the content creation process.

I really like the attention to detail that Circle has given to its editor.

For instance, it comes with the ability to add a cover image for each post, which would be really helpful when you are writing an entire blog post or a tutorial inside of inside of Circle.

This is a really big benefit over other platforms, like say Mighty Networks, which only offer a basic content editor without any formatting options.

🤫 Pro tip: You can use the spaces functionality (with card-view layout) to host your training courses instead of spending additional money on Circle’s higher plans for course functionality.

Community access

Before creating content, you need to add people to your community space.

Let me explain.

With Circle, you have the ability to set certain spaces as private or secret and create paywalls for them.

This allows you to control access to the content within those spaces and charge for access.

For example, you can create an offer called Pro membership and select the spaces that purchasers of this membership should have access to.

In addition to access controls, Circle provides additional features like post-purchase actions and the ability to add custom conversion tracking code that executes upon checkout.

You also have an option to customize the login screen when a user tries to access the paywall space.

This is a conversion opportunity, prompting users to upgrade their membership.

Onboarding new users

In Circle, you have various options to customize the onboarding experience for new community members.

Head over to the settings and under onboarding, you can customize the invitation emails that will be sent to new members of the community.

Circle offers customizable invitation emails with dynamic variables like invitation and community URLs. You can tailor emails for new and existing Circle users. The platform also allows customization of post-signup onboarding messages to welcome and guide new members.

To take it further, you can use Circle’s automation workflows (available in their higher plan) to say:

• 📧 Automatically send a welcome message when a new member joins the community.
• 🚨 Notify admins when a new member joins the community.
• and more… 🚀

Apart from this feature, in Circle, you have the option to set default login pages for both existing and new members.

Upon joining the community, new members are automatically guided to the “Start Here” page, offering answers to FAQs and prompting self-introduction.

Also, returning members are directed to the home page, providing a glimpse of recent community activities.

Events and livestreaming

Creating webinars or live office discussions really fosters a sense of community and encourages more active engagement.

Circle features built-in live-streaming for calls with up to 30 participants or events for up to 1,000 members.

You can create a dedicated space for these events within the community feature.

Within this space, you can create multiple events and schedule them.

When creating an event, you can specify the date, time, duration, and even set it as a recurring event to avoid repetitive scheduling.

For example, on every Wednesday, if you have a weekly mastermind call, you can set it.

Also, when it comes to the location of the event, you can choose between Circle’s own live streaming feature (with recording feature), Zoom or Google Meet.

Online courses

In 2023, Circle introduced a course feature with basic LMS capabilities.

❓ Did you know? The CEO of Teachable, Ankur Nagpal has 90% of his liquid net-worth invested in Circle!

Now.

To control the order in which students consume the content in training course, you can choose from three types of course spaces:

1. Self-paced: Students have immediate access to all course content upon enrollment.
2. Structured: Course sections are released gradually based on student enrollment.
3. Scheduled: Each section is released on a specific date for all students according to a predetermined schedule.

The course curriculum is organized into sections and lessons, supporting text, audio/video, and embed codes.

Also, lectures can be drip-scheduled to prevent binge-watching.

When it comes to lesson content, you can include various building blocks like you would do with Notion for creating the content.

Also Circle has automated transcriptions for videos improving content discoverability in lengthy videos.

This feature allows users to search within videos and easily find relevant sections.

However, with Courses there are some limitations to consider:

• Lack of course compliance features: Circle doesn’t enforce quiz completion, video watch duration, and lecture order.
• No direct course completion certificates: Circle doesn’t offer course completion certificates directly. However, you can issue them using third-party services like Accredible through Zapier integration.
• Limited course engagement reports: Circle lacks advanced reporting to monitor course completion rates and per-student course interaction. It also doesn’t provide video watch retention rates.

👉 By the time you are reading this blog post, there may be additional features that have been rolled out given their substantial funding.

Engagement and gamification

Circle doesn’t come with advanced gamification features, such as the ability to assign points, badges, challenges, and milestones, to really amp up community engagement.

However see this:

⚙ In Circle, there’s this cool feature called Automation Workflows. With it, you can easily assign tags to community members based on their behaviors or actions in the community. And you know what’s even more fun? These tags show up on their profiles. If you want to get creative,you can transform these tags into badges by adding emojis to their names.

Also.

Recently, Circle introduced their Community AI features, including something called “Activity Scores”. These scores help measure and improve member engagement within the community.

Each member is assigned a community engagement activity score based on their presence, contribution, participation, and connection.

🎲 Activity scores consider key engagement factors and are benchmarked against data from other Circle communities. This allows for scoring based on relative activity levels and seasonality. This improves score accuracy as more communities join the platform.

With these activity scores, community builders can easily identify members who are actively engaged and implement gamification strategies to further enhance engagement.

In summary, while Circle doesn’t include specific gamification features, you can utilize its automation feature to assign different tags for levels and badges. You can also take advantage of the activity score feature.

Reporting and analytics

The reporting and analytics is now only revolving around their community component.

In the analytics overview tab, you will find various metrics, including:

• Average daily active members
• Monthly active members
• Top members
• Active topics
• Active spaces
• Popular days/times

Additionally, Circle.so provides dedicated reports on members, engagement, and channels.

• Member analytics: This section provides data on the most active topic starters, top commenters, and highly appreciated members.
• Engagement analytics: Here, you can find statistics on topic and comment engagement. You can also filter activity by date to view the most popular topics and comments during a specific time period.

👎 Unlike dedicated learning management systems such as Teachable or Kajabi, you don’t have access to student-level analytics and video retention graphs. However, this feature is included in their roadmap (real soon).

Design and customization

Circle.so provides extensive customization options for your communities.

You have the ability to change the community name, URL, visibility, header images, logo, and brand colors.

🎨 Aside from this,you can’t make significant changesto their user interface, such as altering the sidebar or layout. Currently, Circle doesn’t offer different themes or layouts to truly personalize your community. As a result, all communities hosted on Circle appear quite similar.

But, Circle supports custom domains.

You can host communities under your own domain. This builds trust among the audience and helps in conversions.

Automation

Workflows

Circle has recently rolled out a workflow automation feature that allows you to set triggers and actions for automating various aspects in your community.

There are up to 20 workflows and 20 bulk action triggers available on the Business plan. Go with an Enterprise plan for unlimited workflows.

There are 3 types of workflows:

1. Automation Workflow: Streamline tasks with automated actions based on conditions.
2. Bulk Action Workflow: Select a list of your audience members and perform a bulk action immediately.
3. Scheduled Workflow: Set bulk actions to run on a recurring basis

It’s like having Zapier inside of Circle.

In fact, similar to Zapier, Circle provides different templates to accelerate the process of creating automation workflows.

In the example above, you can see that when a student or member completes a course and is tagged with a particular tag.

The possibilities are endless.

Here are a few of the scenarios 🤖 :

• Send a direct message 📨 and add a member tag 🏷️ when a member joins the community.
• Send a message to members 📩 when they RSVP to an event 📅.
• Send a reminder to members ⏰ when an event is about to start.
• Add a member to space 🚀 when a tag is added to a member.
• Remove a member tag from the profile 👤 when a member joins a particular space.
• Add a member tag 🏷️ when a member is charged 💰 for a paywall.

Bulk actions

You can apply filters and select target audience to perform bulk actions on them.

Example: You can add a tag in bulk for all the members who have completed the “Mindfulness for beginners” course.

There are various filters are available to segment your target audience based on their custom profile fields, tags, spaces they’re enrolled in, paywalls, location, event RSVP, last login date, etc.

For instance, if community members are offline in particular space(s), then you can send them a direct message.

Here are some bulk actions ideas to maybe set on a recurring basis:

• 🔄 Duplicate space members from one space to another.
• 📨 Send a bulk message to every member of the space (schedule this).
• 👥 Add a member tag to every member of the space.
• ➕ Add members with similar interests to a specific space or space group.
• 🎉 Much more.

Email marketing

Circle lacks a dedicated email marketing feature beyond the regular weekly digests and transactional emails.

While it offers automation workflows, it doesn’t match up with say – Kajabi’s integrated email marketing capabilities.

To use email marketing with Circle, you must connect it to external software via Zapier.

Marketing and checkout

Circle offers coupons, discounts, and trials to increase sales. As of now, it doesn’t offer downsells and order bumps.

When it comes to checkout, Circle offers a one-step checkout process and only supports Stripe as a payment gateway; it does not support PayPal.

It does not have the option to add order bumps or upsells as profit maximizers. Additionally, it also lacks the option to add conversion-boosting elements like testimonials and other social proof found in dedicated checkout platforms like Thrivecart or SamCart.

However, if you still need the ability to include upsells and order bumps as checkout features, you should consider integrating Thrivecart with Circle using Zapier or Webhooks.

In fact, this use case is the most popular Zap in Zapier.

Mobile app

Circle.so has both iOS and Android apps.

Members can access their communities, courses, events, and chats all within the apps.

The apps also support in-app purchases and branded notifications, which have better open rates than traditional emails.

One great feature of Circle is the ability to go live directly within the app.

When you go live, all your members will receive notifications, similar to how Facebook sends notifications when your favorite creator starts a live stream.

This feature allows for real-time engagement and interaction with your community members.

To stay updated on all future app updates, you can follow this help guide.

Members can set their own notification preferences either via email or in-app, allowing them to manage updates effectively. They can tailor these settings for each space.

Alongside this, Circle supports event notifications, ensuring members are informed when a new event is published or when they RSVP. To maintain high event attendance, Circle also manages confirmations and reminders.

Integrations

Circle.so has native integrations with 15+ tools and services.

Additionally, it provides custom single sign-on (SSO) integration with Sendgrid, Teachable, Memberstack, MemberSpace, Memberful, WordPress, Twitter, etc.

For the rest, you need to use Zapier and API integrations.

Circle has deep integration with Zapier. As of now, it has 14 triggers and whopping 21 actions. I must say Circle.so knows that the future of work is API!

Circle.so pricing

Circle.so has four premium plans. The lowest plan costs $49/mo.

You might be thinking, “I only need the community feature. $49 per month seems ideal for me.”

But, there’s more to it.

Hidden down on their pricing page, there’s a limitation.

Even with the Basic plan, which costs $49 per month, you can only host up to 100 members.

The “Basic” plan is like a decoy plan.

In order to access courses, live streams, and live rooms, you need to subscribe to the Professional plan, which costs $99 per month.

So, most people need to shell out $99/month.

😮 It was also a BIG surprise for me when I first decided to go with Circle.

And also, Circle has introduced a brand-new Business plan at $199/mo with features like:

• Workflows
• Customizable fields
• API Access
• Email white-labeling

As of now, the Business plan is not available on that pricing page; it’s offered as an upgrade option when you sign up for any of their plans.

If you feel Circle is not affordable for you, I suggest you take a look at some of its alternatives.

Sign up for 14 days free trial

FAQs on Circle.so

1. What is Circle.so?

   Circle.so is a leading online community platform available today. Along with communities, it also supports memberships, courses, digital downloads, and live streams.

2. Does Circle offer a trial to explore its features?

   Yes. You can sign up for its 14 days free trial and get your hands on the tool.

3. Can I get any discount on Circle?

   If you choose its annual billing you can avail up to $39 OFF.

4. Does Circle have mobile apps?

   Yes. It has both iOS and Android apps.

Conclusion

Despite being relatively new, Circle is a well-funded community platform that stands out due to its focus on UI/UX, really good mobile apps, integrations and also community automation workflows .

As I noted in my previous comparison with Mighty Networks, Circle’s features are more intentional and well thought out.

They have an impressive speed of execution and a solid roadmap for improvements.

They’ve followed the footsteps of new-age startups like Notion and Slack.

But currently, Circle lacks advanced course creation, emails and other specialist LMS functionality, but as it has backing by the former Teachable team, it shows promise for future enhancements.

Afterall, the founders’ vision is to make it an all-in-one learning platform.